The
Changing Face of Anti-Semitism, by Walter LaqueurOxford
University Press, 228 pages, $22.00

Book Review by Mark Goldblatt / first published in the Claremont Review of Books, 2007

The Book of Esther in the Hebrew
Bible recounts what is perhaps the world’s first attempted pogrom. The fanciful
tale of the persecution and deliverance of the captive Jewish people during the
reign of the Persian King Ahasuerus (often identified as Xerxes I, who reigned
from 486-465 B.C.) tells the story of Haman, the king’s second-in-command, who
plots to kill all the Jews under Persian rule. Haman feels slighted because the
Jewish leader Mordecai won’t bow down to him and urges Ahasuerus to authorize
genocide: “There is a certain people scattered and separated among the peoples
in all the provinces of your kingdom; their laws are different from those of
every other people, and they do not keep the king’s laws, so that it is not
appropriate for the king to tolerate them. If it pleases the king, let a decree
be issued for their destruction…” (Esther 3:8-9). Haman’s plot is eventually
foiled by the king’s favorite wife, Esther, herself a Jew and Mordecai’s
cousin. Haman is hung on the king’s orders, Mordecai is promoted in his place,
and “for the Jews there was light and gladness, joy and honor.”

Rarely since then have things
turned out so well for the Jews, as Walter Laqueur recounts in his new book, The Changing Face of Anti-Semitism.
Laqueur, a historian and author of Fascism:
Past, Present, and Future (1996)and
The New Terrorism: Fanaticism and the
Arms of Mass Destruction (1999) sets for himself the daunting task of
chronicling the long history of anti-Semitism from biblical times to the
present. That he mostly succeeds, in just over 200 pages, is a remarkable
achievement.

According to Laqueur, the roots of
anti-Semitism can be traced, at least in part, to the historical fact of the
Diaspora—the scattering of Jewish people throughout the ancient world after the
destruction of the state of Judea by the Romans in 73 A.D. Of course, many
ethnic and religious groups have been dispersed by calamity and conquest—Laqueur
cites the example of the Kurds—but they have tended to remain in roughly
contiguous territories, awaiting an opportunity to coalesce again into an
autonomous state; Jews, by contrast, actually did disperse, forming
recognizable minority communities across the globe—each of which seemed to
reinforce, to outsiders, the distinctive nature of Jewish society. Even though
Jews often assimilated, they seemed to do so for strictly pragmatic reasons; in
matters of the heart, or when push came to shove, they “stuck to their own,
isolated themselves, and (so it appeared to outsiders) considered themselves
somehow better than others because of being the chosen people and having a
special connection with their god.”

If anti-Semitism in the first few
centuries after the Diaspora was exceptionally far-flung, it was, as Laqueur
notes, only “one of many national and ethnic antagonisms.” Hostility towards
Judaism acquires its peculiar status with the ascendance of its rival sect,
Christianity—which became, by decree of Theodosius, the official religion of
the Roman Empire in 380. Jews, after all, had rejected Jesus and were believed
by many Christians to be the main culprits in his death. “There is no doubt,”
Laqueur writes, “that the advent of Christianity and…its subsequent
interpretation present the turning point in the history of anti-Semitism and
the Jews.” Whenever and wherever Christianity reigned during the Middle Ages,
anti-Semitism was likely thrive. Even as thoughtful a figure as St. Augustine
implores God to slay the Jews so that none would be left to oppose His word.
Christian communities were rife with rumors of Jewish treachery; Jews, it was
believed, butchered Christian children to bake into their Passover bread, poisoned
local wells, and spread disease. Denunciations, persecutions, and forced
expulsions became so frequent during this period that it comes as a surprise
when Pope Clement VI issues a papal bull in 1348 insisting that the Black Death
was not specifically the fault of the
Jews but rather a divine punishment against all mankind for its sins.

Jews fared slightly better under Islam
after its rise in the 7th century. Though relegated to second-class citizenship
under Muslim rule, the Jews were nevertheless spared the relentless suspicion
and concerted assaults they suffered in Christian Europe. According to the
Koran, Muhammad himself had Jewish friends; Muslims regard Moses, as well as
Jesus, as genuine prophets, and both Jews and Christians are ahl al-kitab—People of the Book. On the
other hand, the Koran also specifically instructs Muslims to kill Jews and
refers to them as “sons of apes and pigs.” A 9th-century hadith (commentary on
the Koran) states that the “last hour” will not come until Muslims fight
against Jews, until the trees and stones themselves cry out, “O Muslim, there
is a Jew hiding behind me. Come and kill him.” The status of Jews under Muslim
rule, in short, if slightly more secure than under Christian rule, remained tenuous.

The Protestant Reformation brought
with it improved circumstances for the Jews of Europe. Luther, it is true, was
rabidly anti-Semitic, and authored a 1543 pamphlet called “The Jews and Their
Lies” in which he suggested that synagogues be burned, Jewish homes be
destroyed, and the remaining Jews be put under one roof so that “they realize
that they are not masters in our land as they boast but miserable captives.” On
the contrary, Calvin’s attitude towards Judaism was more enlightened. He noted
that the “seed of Abraham” was part of the body of Christ and that God’s divine
calling of the Jews could not be rendered null and void, insisting that “our
differences with them were purely theological.” Throughout the Reformation,
where Calvinism took deepest root—most conspicuously in the Netherlands—Jews
fared relatively well.

The idea of Judaism as a foreign
entity, a kind of contagion within the body of humanity, rather than merely as
a religious sect, began to emerge during the Enlightenment. Speaking of Jews,
Voltaire wrote, “I would not be in the least surprised if these people would
not some day become deadly to the human race.” Kant and Hegel also held low
opinions of Jews, and such sentiments were to acquire the whiff of scientific
respectability with the advent of race theory in the late 18th century. Racial
categorization was, from the outset, more than just anthropological color
coding; each race was assumed to possess innate behavioral characteristics. The
Jews, by their very nature, were parasitic. It wasn’t merely their beliefs or
traditions that were alien; alienation was their essence. They insinuated
themselves into a society like a cancer and began to suck the life out of it.

The term “anti-Semitism” first came
into common use in the second half of the 19th century, popularized by Wilhelm
Marr, a German journalist, who meant it not as moral critique but as a policy
recommendation. Marr argued that it was ignorant, and strategically foolish, to
attack Jews as “Christ-killers” or for their alleged ritual murder of
Christians. He believed that the real danger posed by Jews lay in their
disproportionate influence in upper strata of German society and, related to
that, the effects on the national culture of the “Jewish spirit”—a sense of
cosmopolitanism (or, if you prefer, statelessness) that undermined traditional
notions of German identity. Unless the people could defeat the Jewish spirit—that
is, enact anti-Semitism—Marr concluded, they had no future: “Finis Germaniae.”

We are now within sight of the
Holocaust. The Holocaust is the shadow that looms over Laqueur’s work; indeed,
it is hard to read any narrative of the persecutions of Jews without a sense of
dread, of the gathering momentum of collective animus and theoretical
justifying which culminates in the hell of Nazi Germany. The singularity of the
Holocaust derives not from its body count. What makes the Holocaust unique is
the methodology, the step-by-step legal process enacted by the Nazis which identified
Jews under their control, isolated them in ghettoes, deported them to
concentration camps, and then systematically exterminated them. History is rife
with shallow graves. But only in the Holocaust did the blundering ham-fisted
brutality of the human species take up a scalpel. This is the first and final
truth of the crematoriums. Laqueur’s account of the Third Reich’s campaign of
liquidation, though brief, is undoubtedly the highlight of his book.

That said, the book is not without
faults, the most glaring of which is a function of its length. This is mostly a
mentioning book. It is short on both
anecdote and analysis, which makes it a consistently dry read. Indeed, at times
it has the feel of an extended encyclopedia article. But like a good
encyclopedia article, by the end you sense you’ve gotten a thorough overview of
the subject. For that, Laqueur is to be applauded.

Sal
Salamone died, suddenly, on August 28, 2012, during the summer break in the Trumpet
Fiction reading series here at KGB. After Jonathan found out that Sal was gone, he
suggested that we take a few minutes to remember him, so that’s why I’m
up here, behind this podium, tonight. It’s fitting that we should remember Sal. He was part of the Trumpet
Fiction family. Apart from Jonathan and Charles and Annie and me, Sal attended more of these readings than anyone else. He bought every book
Greenpoint Press published—and just about every book by every author who read
at Trumpet Fiction. He was also a writer himself, a serious writer, as
disciplined in his process and as determined in his work as any I’ve ever
known. But he never asked to read at Trumpet Fiction. For one thing, he didn’t
like to be the center of attention. But he also had a weird verbal tic where he
would regularly invert the syllables of words. As a friend of ours said after
the funeral, Sal had gone to meet the “Gangel Abriel.” So that’s another reason
we’re remembering him, and his work, tonight.

The great
writing project of Sal’s life’s was a novel called Fate and Other Tyrants. It’s an epic story set in Italy that weaves
together politics and religion and love and betrayal across two war-torn
generations in the first half of the twentieth century. The novel took him 30
years to finish. For those 30 years, Sal worked full time as a computer analyst
at Manufacturers Hanover Trust, which merged into Chemical Bank, which merged
into Chase Manhattan Bank, which acquired JP Morgan and became JP Morgan-Chase.
His job was to write the computer patches that synched the payroll programs
after each merger. He wrote his novel during lunch hours and coffee breaks, at
night and on weekends; he even wrote while the mainframes were running tests of
his patch programs. He wrote long hand, in green and black composition books.
After he finished his first draft, over a decade into the project, he
keyboarded the entire thing into something called Leading Edge word processor—revising
and editing as he went along. That took another five years. Unfortunately, during
those five years, Microsoft Word became the industry standard . . . and it
couldn’t convert Leading Edge documents. So Sal had to keyboard in the entire
manuscript again—once again, editing and revising as he went along. That took
another five years. It was at that point that he printed out a copy for me.

It was 2,822
pages long.

At 275 words per page, that's roughly the same length as the King James Bible. It took me
six months to get through it; during that time, the physical weight of the manuscript
warped the corner section of my desk. But I did finish it. The story is
fast-paced, and the characters are vivid, but the writing is uneven. He needed
an editor—he knew it himself. While I was reading it, he began sending out
queries to a dozen publishing houses. But, strangely enough, none of them were interested
in a 2,822 page novel from an unpublished author. Same for literary agents. He resigned
himself to the fact that he was going to have to self-publish the book. But
even iUniverse couldn’t deal with 2,822 manuscript pages. He was told he would
have to break it up into three sections. The easy thing would have been to break
it up chronologically. But writers who do the easy thing don’t write 2,822 page
novels. He broke it up thematically: one volume keyed to the rise of Fascism,
one keyed to tensions within the Church, one keyed to the struggle of
intellectuals and journalists. The process of splitting up and re-editing the
novel, then polishing and publishing the threeindividual volumes, took him another nine years.

Six months into his retirement, he handed
me the third and final published volume. That was Thursday afternoon, August 23,
2012, after he and I and John and Kevin finished a round of pitch and putt
golf. The following Tuesday, August 28, Sal was out in his backyard playing
basketball with his 16 year old nephew. He started to feel sick . . . but he
finished the game. Then he walked back into his house, collapsed, and died. He
was 64.

Sal knew
writing was never going to make him rich. He knew it was never going to make
him famous. But he kept writing, decade after decade, for the purest reason of
all: He had a story he wanted to tell.
He wasn’t the greatest writer I’ve ever known. But he was noblest.

The last thing Sal ever wrote, as far as I can tell, was a group email to the three of us—me, John, and Kevin—apologizing for not getting back to us sooner, and confirming that he could again play pitch and putt the following Thursday. That wasthe Thursday, as it turned out, after he died:“Guys, I spoke with Mark, and I can definitely make Thursday's golf and lunch. I'm taking August off from writing, so I'm not on the
computer everyday. Thanks for remembering me.”

I want to
thank Jonathan, and Charles, and Annie, and the rest of you who knew him, for remembering Sal tonight.
I know there are a lot of writers in this crowd. Which means there are a lot of
people sitting here who understand the effort, and the frustration, and the
grief, and, if you’re lucky, the occasional sense of accomplishment that goes
with writing. I’d ask that you remember Sal too, even if you didn’t know him. And if you’re so inclined, keep him in your prayers, at least for a while.

(Originally published 8/17/04 in Frontpage Magazine. Edited and expanded.)

One of the more debilitating cognitive blind spots of
progressives is their belief that pathological behavior is always the result of
privation: If only people were rescued from poverty, or ignorance, or
hopelessness, the progressive mind reasons, they would cease doing terrible things.
But in the case of Islamic terrorism, which is a pathological behavior, such an
analysis is off the mark. On the contrary, the psychic justifications for
Islamic terrorism can be found in an intellectually accessible and, in its own
way, profoundly moving philosophy that stands in direct opposition to the
liberal democratic institutions and Enlightenment values of the West.

The key figure, according to many scholars of recent Islamic history, is the Egyptian fundamentalist thinker Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966),
whose writings form the basis for radical Islam’s struggle against Western
ascendancy. Qutb’s signature contribution to Muslim thought was to update the
concept of jahiliyya. For centuries, jahiliyya had
signified the state of ignorance in the world prior to the advent of Islam;
according to Qutb, however, jahiliyya should also be
understood as the underlying spirit of decadence and corruption which exists in
all times and all places--and which true Muslims are duty-bound to fight
against. There can be no compromise with jahiliyya. “The mixing and
co-existence of truth and falsehood is impossible,” Qutb wrote. “Command
belongs to Allah or else to jahiliyya.” What was required, for
Muslims, was to live under the strict Islamic code of laws called the sharia.
It was the only way to ensure that they were living the way Allah intended.

Despite the sharia’s rigidity, Qutb argued
that it was the sole source of genuine liberation since the sharia came
from God. Either human beings were ruled by God, or else they were ruled by
other human beings; there was no distinction, on this level, between an
absolute dictatorship or a representative democracy. Both amounted to the rule
of men over men--which, according to Qutb, was always a form of oppression.
(It’s worth noting that Qutb reserved many of his most virulent criticisms for
secular-minded Muslims.) Only the rule of God provided people with freedom.
Thus, Qutb rejected out of hand the entire Enlightenment project which sought
to separate church from state.

Whatever else might be said of Qutb’s worldview, it
represents a straightforward, coherent, easily understood system of beliefs--a
system which has been vastly influential among Islamic radicals, including
Osama bin Laden. (Osama’s mentor and co-jihadist, Ayman Zawahiri, was a student
and follower of Qutb; while studying at King Abdulaziz University, Osama
attended weekly lectures by Qutb’s brother, and fellow students recall Osama as
deeply drawn to Qutb’s thought.) Jihad is legitimized, in the radicals’ eyes,
as the struggle against jahiliyya. The only question is how far
jihad is aimed. The short-term project would consist of casting out the infidel
Jews and Christians from Islamic holy lands and recapturing the holy cities of
Mecca and Medina from the jahiliyya-tainted Saudi regime; the
long-term project would consist of subjugating the non-Islamic West, which
means defeating the United States, in order, first, to keep its corrupting
influences out of Islam, and, ultimately, to liberate the West itself from the suffocating
darkness of Enlightenment secularism.

It is a totalitarian movement
in the truest sense.

The war against Islamic totalitarianism, on a fundamental level,
is therefore a struggle between Enlightenment and anti-Enlightenment forces. To
overlook this first truth--as progressives are wont to do--is to misapprehend
the nature of the entire conflict. To be sure, there are other element
involved. Ethnic rivalries. Nationalist movements. Regional and tribal
loyalties. Religious schisms. Historical grievances. Natural resources. Global
economics. The war is a witches’ brew of divided allegiances and
score-settling. But at its bottom, beneath the claims and counter-claims, the
war is between two irreconcilable visions for the future of mankind. The forces
of liberal Enlightenment, committed to rational inquiry and religious tolerance,
manifest in democratic rule, versus the forces of anti-Enlightenment,
committed to faithful obedience to a divine will, manifest in sharia rule.

It is Thomas Jefferson versus Sayyid Qutb.

***

From our perspective, to be sure, it seems fantastic, even
absurd, to talk about the defeat of the United States by the terrorists--which
is the only path to the realization of their totalitarian goal. But our
perspective is not the perspective of Osama and his ilk, who take a much longer
view of history, a view in which even the most devastating setback is merely
temporary and in which compromise is, literally, worse than death. Their hearts
and minds are fixed against us, their struggle for our destruction is what
gives their lives meaning, and they’re not going to be won over to our view . .
. any more than you could be won over, say, to abandoning the welfare of your
children. Muslim radicals ask nothing of us save our submission to Islam or our
extinction. If we take them at their words (and what reason do we have to doubt
them?) then they despise America as much for our traditions as for our policies,
as much for who we are as for what
we do--since we are, in effect, the cultural, intellectual and military
vanguard of jahiliyya. Osama himself spelled this out in his
November 2002 letter to the American people. After a pro forma rant about alleged wrongs perpetrated by the United
States on Muslims worldwide, Osama outlined his demands: “.
. . we call on you [Americans] to stop your oppression, lies, immorality and debauchery . .
.we call on you to be a people of
manners, principles, honor and purity; to reject the immoral acts of
fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants, gambling, and trading with interest.”

Osama’s bullet points follow. They're worth quoting at
length:

*You are the nation who, rather than ruling by the Sharia of Allah
in its Constitution and Laws, choose to invent your own laws as you will and
desire. You separate religion from your policies, contradicting the pure nature
which affirms Absolute Authority to the Lord and your Creator. You flee from
the embarrassing question posed to you: How is it possible for Allah the
Almighty to create His creation, grant them power over all the creatures and
land, grant them all the amenities of life, and then deny them that which they
are most in need of: knowledge of the laws which govern their lives?

*You are the nation that permits Usury, which has been forbidden
by all the religions. Yet you build your economy and investments on Usury. As a
result of this, in all its different forms and guises, the Jews have taken
control of your economy, through which they have then taken control of your
media, and now control all aspects of your life making you their servants and
achieving their aims at your expense; precisely what Benjamin Franklin warned
you against.

*You are a nation that permits the production, trading and usage
of intoxicants. You also permit drugs, and only forbid the trade of them, even
though your nation is the largest consumer of them.

*You are a nation that permits acts of immorality, and you consider
them to be pillars of personal freedom. You have continued to sink down this
abyss from level to level until incest has spread amongst you, in the face of
which neither your sense of honor nor your laws object.

*Who can forget your President Clinton's immoral acts committed in
the official Oval office? After that, you did not even bring him to account,
other than that he “made a mistake,” after which everything passed with no
punishment. Is there a worse kind of event for which your name will go down in
history and be remembered by nations?

*You are a nation that permits gambling in its all forms. The
companies practice this as well, resulting in the investments becoming active
and the criminals becoming rich.

*You are a nation that exploits women like consumer products or
advertising tools calling upon customers to purchase them. You use women to
serve passengers, visitors, and strangers to increase your profit margins. You
then rant that you support the liberation of women.

*You are a nation that practices the trade of sex in all
its forms, directly and indirectly. Giant corporations and establishments are
established on this, under the name of art, entertainment, tourism and freedom,
and other deceptive names you attribute to it.

*And because of all this, you have been described in history as a
nation that spreads diseases that were unknown to man in the past. Go ahead and
boast to the nations of man that you brought them AIDS as a Satanic American
Invention.

Such were Osama’s grievances. The sum of them is what makes
us, in Osama's words, “the worst civilization witnessed by the history of mankind.” Or, in other
words, satanic. But Satan, as conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza has
noted, does not conquer. He seduces. America, in the minds of Muslim radicals,
is not merely the worst civilization in history but the most seductive because
we are jahiliyya, unveiled. And we are up in their faces. In a worse way
than the ancient giant statues of Buddha in Bamyan, Afghanistan were up in
their faces when radicals dynamited them in March 2001; in a worse way than
Paddy’s Pub nightclub in Bali, Indonesia was up in their faces when radicals
detonated a suicide bomb inside, and then a car bomb outside, killing 202
civilians and wounding another 200 in October 2002; in a worse way than the
Miss World Pageant in Nigeria was up in their faces when radicals rioted to
protest the contestants’ immodesty, killing 100 and injuring over 500 in
November 2003 . . . on television, radio and the internet, in glossy magazines,
news journals and paperback books, on movie screens, home videos and CDs, Americans
are absolutely everywhere, defying the sharia, acting out in every
conceivable manner to seduce the next generation of Muslims away from the path
of righteousness. We are bombarding them with the flotsam and jetsam of our pop
media, from Eminem’s potty mouth to Britney Spears’s gyrating pelvis, from the
Rock’s arched eyebrow to Brandi Chastain’s sports bra, from the brawling on
the Jerry Springer Show to the mincing on Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. Such
ephemera are tolerated by us, the lowbrow excretions of our dedication to
highbrow ideals like individual liberty, artistic expression and free
enterprise. For Muslim radicals, they are the toxic images of a steady
spiritual genocide being wrought upon them.

The radicals were striking back at us, albeit with mosquito-like
forays, since the era of disco music and leg warmers; on September 11th, 2001,
they finally got our attention.

From that morning on, our task in the war against Islamic totalitarianism became axiomatic: Kill or imprison-for-life every Muslim
radical in the world. It’s a different kind of war since it cannot end with the
surrender of a collective entity; no white flag will ever be respected by our
enemies. Prosecuting the war on terror is more like prosecuting hundreds of
thousands of miniature wars in which our enemies are individual persons,
determined to fight to the death. This is crucial. Even if every Islamic regime
in Asia and Africa were to embrace liberal democracy and Enlightenment values,
the United States would remain at war with Ahmed, Samir, Abdul, et al.

The radicals must be neutralized, one by one.

The difficult question is how to neutralize them without
creating more radicals to take their place.

***

The name that has yet to arise in our discussion of the war
against Islamic totalitarianism is Saddam Hussein. It is altogether legitimate, given
the foregoing, to ask whether George W. Bush’s decision to end Saddam’s regime
in Iraq was justified as a response to the September 11th attacks on
the United States--attacks in which Saddam, as any rational observer must now
concede, had no part.

The answer is a roundabout yes: President Bush’s decision
to oust Saddam was justifiable. But to make sense of it, we have to set aside
the strong emotions that decision conjures up even now. For progressives, this
means letting go, for a moment or two, their visceral distrust of the Bush
Administration. For traditional conservatives, this means letting go their reflexive
desire to support the prerogatives of the Commander in Chief during a time of
war. Rational inquiry, rather than political passion, is required to draw the
connection between the attacks of September 11th and the decision to
oust Saddam. Step one in such an inquiry returns us that miserable Tuesday
morning in 2001, that miserable Tuesday morning of warm sunshine and perfect
blue skies when the world changed.

From the radicals’ standpoint, the sight of the Twin Towers
crumbling to dust, the sight of their ashes rising up to blot out the sun over
Manhattan, must surely have seemed like an act of God--an unforgettable,
historic blow against jahiliyya. Beyond what the moment meant to
the radicals, however, a perilous message went out to the rest of the world.
Since the end of World War Two, America’s national security had rested, to a
substantial degree, on the belief that a sudden, concerted attack on the United
States would be answered by retaliation on a biblical scale. That belief, it
turned out, was false. Osama called our bluff. He hit us in a horrific way, and
we didn’t lash out in vengeance. We investigated, determined who was behind the
attack . . . and even once we knew it was Osama, and that he was operating out
of Afghanistan, even then we did not incinerate the Kabul. Rather, we only
demanded that the Taliban government hand over Osama “dead or alive.” In doing
so, we inadvertently, and unavoidably, provided our international enemies with
an easy-to-follow formula for making war against America: Just work your mayhem
through non-state surrogates and, after the next 9/11, if America again
connects the dots, hand over a few corpses to satisfy Washington’s demand for
justice.

Saddam Hussein seemed the most likely candidate to
capitalize on that formula.

It’s important to recall that regime change in Iraq had
been an official policy of the United States since the Clinton
Administration--which was empowered by Congress in 1998 to use any means short
of a military invasion to remove Saddam. (Which is the reason President Bush sought and received Congressional authorization to use military force prior to the invasion of Iraq.) The attacks of September 11th,
and our measured response to them in Afghanistan, shifted Saddam from
back-burner annoyance to front-burner threat--notwithstanding the fact that his
pan-Arabism was hard to square with the radical Islam of Osama’s crowd. Still,
Saddam and Osama were both consumed by totalizing visions of the future of
Islamic peoples, and both saw the United States as the chief impediment to the
realization of their visions. More ominously, if a freelance thug like Osama
managed to kill 3,000 Americans, what might a resolute sociopath like Saddam,
with the financial resources of an oil-drenched country, accomplish?

Now put yourself in President Bush’s position. Here are the
facts as you know them in the immediate aftermath of September 11th:

1) You’ve got the head of
the C.I.A., a holdover from the Clinton Administration, telling you
emphatically that Saddam possesses weapons of mass destruction.

5) You’ve got a British
intelligence report that Saddam recently sought to buy uranium from Niger.

6) You’ve got a history
of Saddam supporting international terrorism, including, as his own foreign
minister has acknowledged, doling out $25,000 “grants” to the families of
Palestinian suicide bombers who kill Israeli civilians (and, occasionally,
American tourists).

7) You’ve got a possible
Saddam-Osama connection cited in a 1998 sealed indictment of Osama from the
Clinton Justice Department, which reads in part: “al Qaeda reached an
understanding with the government of Iraq that al Qaeda would not work against
that government and that on particular projects, specifically including weapons
development, al Qaeda would work cooperatively with the government of Iraq.”
(The charge, you’re informed, was later dropped from the final version of the
indictment for lack of corroborating evidence... but of course you’re aware
of it. It’s another piece of the puzzle.)

8) You’ve got a personal
warning from Russian President Vladimir Putin, who is in a position to know,
and who himself opposes an invasion of Iraq, that Saddam is planning terrorist strikes
against the United States. As reported by CNN on June 18, 2004, here are
Putin’s own words: “I can confirm that after the
events of September 11, 2001, and up to the military operation in Iraq, Russian
special services and Russian intelligence several times received . . .
information that official organs of Saddam's regime were preparing terrorist
acts on the territory of the United States and beyond its borders, at U.S.
military and civilian locations.”

9) You’ve got a 1996
report from the World Health Organization of the United Nations claiming that
4,500 Iraqi children under the age of five are dying each month as a
consequence of the U.N. sanctions. You know the number is a grotesque
exaggeration, based on data provided to the W.H.O. by the oxymoronic Iraqi Ministry
of Heath (which hasn’t stopped the W.H.O. from putting out the statistic as
gospel truth). But even if the actual figure is one tenth of the W.H.O. number,
that’s still 450 children perishing each month under the status quo.

10) You’ve got a theory,
espoused by several prominent members of your administration, that standing up
a liberal democracy in the heart of the Islamic world will encourage
Enlightenment values among Muslims and thus blunt the homicidal/suicidal edge
of radical Islam; it’s just a theory, and will be devilishly
hard to execute, but it represents a hopeful alternative to an endless cycle of
Islamic terrorism and ad hoc measures culminating, seemingly inevitably, in a
massive WMD attack on the United States and a necessarily disproportionate
response.

Are
there dissenting voices? Yes, to be sure. Hans Blix, Chief U.N. Weapons Inspector,
is telling whoever will listen that Iraq has no WMDs. But his history of
evaluating Iraq’s WMD capacity is checkered; as head of the International
Atomic Energy Agency during the 1980s, he praised Iraqi cooperation with
inspections--at the very moment Saddam was building up his WMD arsenal to its
highest levels. Blix’s assessment of Iraq’s WMD capacity is echoed by another
U.N. weapons inspector, Scott Ritter. But there are questions of Ritter’s
reliability as well. On August 31, 1998, for example, just after he resigned
his position as weapons inspector due to what he perceived as lack of support
from the U.N. Security Council, he said:

Iraq still has proscribed
weapons capability. There needs to be a careful distinction here. Iraq today is
challenging the special commission to come up with a weapon and say where is
the weapon in Iraq, and yet part of their efforts to conceal their
capabilities, I believe, have (sic) been
to disassemble weapons into various components and to hide these components
throughout Iraq. I think the danger right now is that without effective
inspections, without effective monitoring, Iraq can in a very short period of
time measured in months, reconstitute chemical biological weapons, long-range
ballistic missiles to deliver these weapons, and even certain aspects of their
nuclear weaponization program.

Yet
almost a year after he had left Iraq, in
June of 1999, Ritter told an interviewer:

When you ask the
question, “Does Iraq possess militarily viable biological or chemical weapons?”
the answer is no! It is a resounding NO. Can Iraq produce today chemical
weapons on a meaningful scale? No! Can Iraq produce biological weapons on a
meaningful scale? No! Ballistic missiles? No! It is “no” across the board. So
from a qualitative standpoint, Iraq has been disarmed. Iraq today possesses no
meaningful weapons of mass destruction capability

So you’re George W. Bush: Are you willing to gamble the collective
security of the American people on the erratic track records of Blix and
Ritter? Setting aside their dissents, however, you’ve also got more pragmatic
concerns. Secretary of State Colin Powell is sounding alarms over the potential
hardships of a postwar occupation of Iraq; “You break it, you bought it,” he is
saying.

On the other hand, you’ve got a copy of the Presidential
Daily Briefing from August 6, 2001 sitting on your desk titled “Bin Laden
determined to strike in U.S.” The intelligence it contains is sketchy--sketchier
by far than the intelligence you now possess about Saddam’s capabilities and intentions--but
the title haunts you nevertheless. If only you had acted preemptively in August
2001, if only you had taken out bin Laden. . .

Again, you’re George W. Bush. What do you do about Iraq?

We know, of course, what the real George W. Bush decided:
Saddam had to go. Given the strategic reality that we could no longer depend on
the threat of a cataclysmic response to deter him, the decision seems
altogether reasonable. Not necessarily right. But, at minimum, reasonable. Ousting
Saddam, moreover, would present hostile regimes elsewhere with a show of
American force, a signal that they might be next if they provoked us--as
deterrents go, not exactly on par with the prospect of sudden annihilation, but
in reality the best we could do. The fact that Saddam was in violation of the
surrender terms which kept him in power in 1991 provided either a legitimate casus belli or a useful fig leaf, depending
on your point of view, acquitting America of the charge of disregarding
international law.

If the decision itself was altogether
reasonable, and it was, Bush must nevertheless be severely faulted for resting
the entire public case for invading Iraq on Saddam’s WMDs. In so doing, Bush
retroactively undermined the rationale of the invasion when no stockpiles of
WMDs turned up. His error in judgment here is especially egregious when we
recall that the more compelling reason to go after Iraq was always the
opportunity to stand up a liberal democratic government in the heart of Islam. The
fact that Bush shifted emphasis only belatedly, after not finding WMDs, was an
unforgivable blunder. From the outset, he needed to make the public case that overthrowing
Saddam’s regime was a phase in the greater struggle to spread Enlightenment
values throughout the Islamic world.

It’s a transformation which,
in the long run, might even point towards an endgame for the war against Islamic totalitarianism.

***

There is no doubt, none whatsoever, about the final outcome
of the war against Islamic totalitarianism. The Islamic world will embrace the Enlightenment values of rational inquiry and
religious tolerance. Such values are no longer optional, not in the twenty-first
century. One hundred years ago, this wasn’t the case. One hundred years ago, a
dozen fanatics, armed with a death wish and the latest technology available,
could perhaps have razed a village. But in the twenty-first century, a dozen
fanatics, armed with a death wish and the latest technology available, could
slaughter millions and set off an economic panic that might bring down the
governments of powerful nations.

Enlightenment values, again, are no longer optional.
Rational inquiry and religious tolerance are the glue of modernity. The Islamic
world will either embrace them or perish. Their predicament is sketched, with
dire poetic flair, by the essayist and philosopher Lee Harris in book Civilization and Its Enemies:

There
is a sense of Greek tragedy, with its dialectic of hubris and nemesis, to what
has been unfolding in the Islamic world. If Muslim extremists continue to use
terror against the West, their very success will destroy them. If they succeed
in terrorizing the West, they will discover that they have in fact only ended
by brutalizing it. And if subjected to enough stress, the liberal system [of
the West] will be set aside and the Hobbesian world will return, and with its
return, the Islamic world will be crushed. Whom the gods would destroy, they
first make mad.

Properly understood, the war on terror is less like a war
than like a race. On the one hand, it’s certain, even as you read these words,
that Islamic radicals are conspiring to stage another assault on the United
States to equal, or perhaps surpass, the carnage of September 11th. On
the other hand, it’s certain, even as you read these words, that American intelligence
agencies and military services are working to kill or capture as many Islamic
radicals as they can get their hands on. The race boils down to this: Can
America effectively dismantle al Qaeda and its allied organizations before the
terrorists manage to strike again, in a major way, on American soil?

The answer is likely no. Tragically no. The difficulty is
that it’s not a fair race. As former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld once
pointed out, al Qaeda is actively recruiting Muslims to their cause at least as
rapidly as the American military is thinning their leadership ranks.
Notwithstanding the heroic efforts of Homeland Security officials and
intelligence agencies to thwart another attack, it’s virtually certain--as our
elected leaders keep reminding us--that the terrorists will eventually succeed.

We will take another hit.

Harris’s insight is that each al Qaeda success hastens the
demise of Islamic terrorism. Not because the United States will eradicate it;
that will never happen. The United States will never eradicate
Islamic terrorism. Islamic terrorism will end only when the overwhelming
majority of Muslims--who currently serve as its psychic enablers, fellow
travelers and tacit sympathizers--turn against it. But in several prominent
Islamic countries, this will entail their turning against their own
governments, which continue to sponsor terrorism. And people do not engage in
civil wars just because foreigners, especially despised foreigners, think they
should.

There are, in fact, only two conceivable scenarios by which
the requisite pan-Islamic upheaval will happen. The more humane scenario is the
one initiated by President Bush. That scenario is to establish a liberal democracy in Iraq, in
the heart of Islam, and hope that it inspires moderate Muslims in the vicinity to
embrace Enlightenment values and reject the radical elements among them. The
cost of this more humane scenario, if it eventually succeeds, will surely be
hundreds of thousands of Muslim lives.

But what if democracy in Iraq fails outright? Or what if it
survives but fails to inspire the overwhelming majority of Muslims to reject
the radicals? In that case, Islamic terrorism continues unabated. What follows
then is the “Hobbesian” scenario Harris sketches: Sooner or later, the United
States will take one hit too many, or one hit too catastrophic, and the
American people will set aside their natural aversion to promiscuous bloodshed
and demand a disproportionate response. They’ll elect a government which
promises to end the threat, permanently, whatever the cost--and the cost will
likely be millions, perhaps scores of millions, of Muslim lives. Like the
German and Japanese civilians in 1945, Muslim civilians from North Africa
through the Persian Gulf and down into Southeast Asia will at last feel their
absolute defeat. They’ll accept that the fundamentalist struggle against the
West has been lost. They’ll dig out from the ruins of their cities and
recognize that they cannot allow the radicals to make martyrs of them all.
Then, with our assistance, both military and financial, they’ll set out to
purge themselves of the terrorist cancer.

Tragically, the Hobbesian scenario is the more probable of
the two. Muslims, collectively, have spent the last five centuries making one
disastrous decision after another. That’s the unvarnished truth. The idea that
liberal democracy in Iraq, if indeed it takes hold, will inspire Muslims
throughout the region to do what needs to be done ranks as a long shot. Still, it’s worth a
try.

***

Again: the outcome of the war against Islamic totalitarianism is
not in doubt. The forces of Enlightenment will, one way or another, eradicate
the forces opposed to Enlightenment. It may take years, or even decades, but Islamic totalitarianism is doomed. Keeping in mind that geopolitical truth, as well as the
self-evident truth that all persons are created equal--and that the killing of
any person therefore represents an equally irreparable tear in the human fabric--we must ask ourselves one basic question about the war against Islamic totalitarianism:
How can we hasten its end with the lowest body count? It’s a gruesome question, but a moral one, haunted
by the likelihood that more deaths sooner might mean fewer deaths in the long
run. The deadlier the weapons the radicals acquire and use, the more viciously
and indiscriminately the war against them will eventually be waged. The scalpel,
if necessary, will surely give way to the terrible swift sword. But there is no
evidence, none whatsoever, that the blood-drenched currents of history can be managed,
any more than they could be managed in the twentieth century, or nineteenth or
eighteenth or seventeenth centuries, no evidence that the mass bloodletting by
which history baptizes generation after generation, against the wills of even
the most powerful leaders, is a thing of the past.

For that reason, it’s crucial not to misunderstand how we
wound up here. The war against Islamic totalitarianism is not the result of George
Bush’s response to September 11th, 2001. It’s not the result of Bill
Clinton’s decision not to assassinate Osama bin Laden, or his decision to pull
out of Somalia after the Mogadishu massacre. It’s not the result of George H.
W. Bush’s decision to leave Saddam in power following the first Gulf War. Or
Ronald Reagan’s withdrawal of marines from Lebanon when their barracks were
bombed. Or Jimmy Carter’s dithering during the Iranian hostage crisis. It’s not
even the result of America’s steadfast support for a Jewish state in the heart
of the Islamic Middle East.

The war against Islamic totalitarianism, on the contrary, is the
culmination of a chain of events set in motion centuries ago, back when the
social evolution of humanity hit a fork in the road. Down one path lay the
Enlightenment . . . and beyond it the goods and, yes, even the excesses of
modernity. That path was taken by predominantly Judeo-Christian peoples. Down
the other path lay a return to the Middle Ages, to stagnant theocracies and
cultural wastelands in which the only relevant question became Who did
this to us? That path was taken by predominantly Islamic peoples. They
are history’s abject losers. And they’re not happy about it.

But abject losers are the deadliest enemies to engage since
they have so little left to lose. They can face down a much greater military power
with the most terrifying of all demands: Either submit to us, or kill
us. The war against Islamic totalitarianism, as it’s currently being waged,
amounts to an effort by America and its allies to stave off the lunacy of
terrorist jihad long enough for moderate Muslims to disassociate themselves
from it . . . and then to kill off the terrorists themselves.

Voltaire never actually said, “I disapprove of what you say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.” Many Americans say it, however—knowing the likelihood of their having to lay down their lives for free speech is roughly nil—because, well, they’re Americans. Defense of free speech is baked into our collective DNA. Or at least it used to be. If nothing else, the Trump Circus of the last few weeks has laid bare a newfound, shall we say, flexibility when it comes to free speech. Forget about defending it to the death. Many of us seem to quiver at the prospect of getting unfriended on Facebook.Now I take a back seat to no one in my revulsion for Donald Trump—the man, as well as the candidate. Saying he’s intellectually and temperamentally unfit for the presidency is like saying Keith Richards isn’t much of a morning person. You’re not exactly breaking news. But anyone with even a faint notion of what it means to be a citizen should be appalled that a ragtag mob of protesters—some chanting their support for faux socialist kewpie doll Bernie Sanders, others sporting Black Lives Matter! T-shirts—was able to shut down a Trump rally last week in Chicago.The response?Let’s just say it has lacked many defenses-to-the-death.Trump’s three Republican rivals, for example, after perfunctory condemnations of the protests, said, in effect, Look at what happens when you’re not nice to people. Without naming Trump, Hillary Clinton condemned “divisive rhetoric.” Sanders was less shy: “What caused the protests at Trump’s rally is a candidate that has promoted hatred and division against Latinos, Muslims, women, and people with disabilities, and his birther attacks against the legitimacy of President Obama.” (You'd think Sanders would credit the protesters, given the number who were chanting his name, with a greater degree of moral agency, but, hey, he's a central planning kind of guy.) MoveOn.org took the whole thing up a notch, venturing into traditional brown shirt terrain: “Mr. Trump and the Republican leaders who support him and his hate-filled rhetoric should be on notice after tonight’s events.” Even President Obama got in a rhetorical sucker punch, again without mentioning Trump by name: "Our leaders—those who aspire to be our leaders—should be trying to bring us together and not turning us against one another.”Well, yeah, Mr. President, it’s great if they do. But does their kumbaya-quotient determine their right to speak to a crowd that shows up to hear them?The truth of the matter is that last week’s Chicago shut-down had little to do with Trump or his supporters. Rather, it had to do with a growing contingent of young people—the protesters’ youth is evident in every video clip of the incident—who feel entitled to silence speech they don't like. They want to claim the entire US as a "safe space" for their political orthodoxy because they know, in a reptilian-brained kind of way, that their orthodoxy cannot withstand rational scrutiny.That last point should not be overlooked. The safe spaces we find on many college campuses are not places students go to avoid getting their feelings hurt; they’re places students go to avoid having their opinions challenged—which is natural since their deepest convictions are rooted in a perpetual sense of victimhood rather than in empirical evidence or logical reasoning. If you reject their victimhood, as conservative speakers are wont to do, you reject their entire identity. You reject them.All of which makes Trump their ideal foil. Not only does he reject their victimhood, he’s as brutish, cliché ridden and bereft of self-awareness and self-control as they are; they detest his agenda (insofar as it can be gleaned from the word salads he tosses) and realize that few in the media (not even at the hated Fox News) will rise to his defense. He’s the kind of guy you can call a totalitarian, with only a Cliff’s Notes grasp of the term, based primarily on his jaw line. So why not shut him down?Answer: Because you don’t shut down political speech. Full stop.Ironically, there is a whiff of totalitarianism blowing across the political landscape right now. It’s the same one that’s already befogged many college campuses. And it ain’t coming from Trump.